The Agony and Ecstasy of Mike Daisey

Mike Daisey, the creator and star of “The Agony and the Ectasy of Steve Jobs.”

When I first encountered “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” the episode of “This American Life” featuring monologuist Mike Daisey on Apple and the practices of its Chinese contract manufacturer Foxconn, I resisted passing it along.

Dozens of people sent it to me and urged me to share the link with others. I’d listened to the show; I thought it was enormously compelling. I love “This American Life,” and I dig Daisey’s work, so why wouldn’t I push it out to my awkwardly large social network?

Maybe it’s because, even then, I felt like something was…off.

I’ve written about China for years, visited there frequently, immersed myself in its historical and contemporary business and culture and history and arts. When I’m there, I’m definitively an American, even if I’m not, as Daisey notes about himself, a large, round and white man who favors Hawaiian shirts. My Mandarin is elementary-school level at best — but I have close friends and coworkers who were born and raised there, and who are both opinionated and, I think, trustworthy.

And the ones closest to the situation also felt like something was…off.

Off enough to prevent me from broadcasting the story in a manner that would have otherwise seemed natural. I’m a long-time user and fan of Apple. But I’ve also been an outspoken believer in the need for both the capitalists of America and quasi-socialists of China to address human rights — and absolutely agree that Apple, the most valuable and profitable company in the world, bears an outsized responsibility to change the landscape for labor in the nation that makes its products possible.

But…could a very large, very round, very white man in a Hawaiian shirt really just roll up to the front gates of Foxconn and begin speaking to Chinese employees without interference? Could he really have happened upon multiple workers under the age of 16, even as young as 12, while standing unmolested and engaging in obvious conversation within barking distance of what he claimed were security guards with guns? (The latter, too, seemed odd: Guns are verboten in China to any but the police and military, and guards for financial institutions and classified-level research complexes. A Foxconn assembly plant doesn’t fit any of those descriptions.)

I didn’t want to call Daisey out: The story was too important, and much of what was in his monologue has been corroborated by other sources. But I felt uncomfortable evangelizing the message. So the news yesterday that Daisey has admitted to falsifying large tracts of his story, including the conversations with underage workers, including the guards with guns — that wasn’t so much surprising as it was disappointing. Today, “This American Life” is taking the unprecedented step of dedicating its entire program to retracting its broadcast of “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” which is now the most popular episode in the show’s illustrious history — it’s had nearly 900,000 podcast downloads to date.

In retrospect, everyone, including “This American Life” host Ira Glass, says they should have known better — except, how could they have? All of the major facts seemed to check out, matching other accounts and Daisey’s own records.

But they if they’d looked back at Daisey’s history, they might have come to a different set of conclusions.

Disclosure: I don’t know Mike Daisey personally. But I’m in his…peripheral circle. We know people who know one another. We’ve walked some of the same halls, spoken before some of the same audiences. Oh yes, and we’re Facebook friends — a connection that I initiated after following his work for years, beginning in my case with his 2001 show “21 Dog Years,” about his experience working as a phone drone for the ecommerce giant Amazon.com.

For me and many other walking-wounded survivors of the Bubble, “21 Dog Years” — a scathing, hilarious, from-the-intestines POV of one of the Great Beasts of the dot-com era — was a brilliant act of catharsis; it was the cold slap of water that many of us needed to shake off our punch-drunk demeanor. Arriving years before YouTube, it nevertheless went viral, the old, slow Faberge Organics way: A friend and former colleague told me to go see it; I saw it and told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. It was a huge hit. It established Daisey’s unique self- and other-deprecatory voice — rueful and insistent, world-weary yet idealistic.

And most importantly, it anointed him a member of a very select set of individuals who serve as the tech world’s dot-conscience: “Insider” enough to know the players and argot, yet not compromised by the seductive allure of being buddy-buddy with the big swinging dorks of the digital universe. Daisey had become a latter-day Socrates, a stinging fly upon the flanks of Seattle and San Francisco. It was a good role, a necessary one. A high profile one, too: Daisey became a much-sought-after TV and radio guest, a frequent heywaitaminnit voice in the media as irrational exuberance once again beset Silicon Valley.

That kind of role demands constant feeding, however. Almost a decade had gone by, in which Daisey applied his cracking wit to targets both lesser — the boardgame Monopoly, raising a puppy, bacon — and greater — the Department of Homeland Security, the global financial infrastructure, American consumerism. His creativity remained vibrant; his work output, consistent. But his relevance, perhaps, had waned. He was no longer the go-to guy on the need to think different about the price we pay for fulfillment of our one-click-download digital dreams.

And so, having been an Apple lover all of his life — if you follow his blog, at mikedaisey.blogspot.com, Apple-related posts run a close second to vintage pictures of exotic, somewhat-naked women — he decided to go after the biggest target in tech’s new world order: Steve Jobs.

Of course, Daisey’s decision to take aim at Jobs wouldn’t have been solely motivated by the desire to return to the center of the conversation around technology and ethics.

He’d dedicated a 2006 monologue, “Great Men of Genius,” to his obsession with a quartet of four larger than life personalities — Bertolt Brecht, P.T. Barnum, Nikola Tesla, and L. Ron Hubbard —who, placed in a blender and then cloned, might have produced something like Steve Jobs. So turning his lens to Jobs and Apple made sense. And it would make news. And make money.

But Daisey wanted to do more than that. He wanted to make a difference.

And that’s where, it seems to me, things began to go a little bit wrong. Because the role of the stinging fly is not to steer the horse, but to keep it awake and alert — to force it to look around and consider its surroundings, before it runs over a cliff or into a ditch.

With “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Daisey took it upon himself not just to poke and provoke, but to rally active protest . The final lines of the monologue don’t offer closure, but an opening — literally:

“When you take your phones out outside to check the time, and the light falls across your face, you will know that it may have been made by children’s hands. You will know that. And you will live with it. Just as I live with it. Just as we’re all going to have to start seeing it if we’re going to make the shift. Tonight, the door is open if you want to walk through it. Tonight we are jailbroken. Tonight we are free.”

The monologue is available in full, for free download. Appended to the play in the PDF is a section titled THE REST OF THE STORY IS IN YOUR HANDS — which touts the work’s enormous resonance and viral impact (specifically naming the historical popularity of the “This American Life” episode), and then urges readers to email Apple CEO Tim Cook, to demand changes from the rest of the hardware industry, to consider reducing their electronics footprint — and yes, to “spread the virus.”

Daisey’s pivot from opinionator to organizer made him an overnight “hot get” not just for public radio but prime-time TV. He was interviewed by the AP (which is reviewing its coverage of Daisey to determine what corrections are necessary). He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times (since redacted for false statements). In each case, he was being framed as an investigator, a researcher — a journalist, in all but name. Not what he is: A storyteller, and a masterful one. But he never denied or corrected those who showered him with praise for his groundbreaking “reporting.”

That is, until his falsifications and exaggerations were revealed by “Marketplace” China correspondent Rob Schmitz, acclaimed-apple-critic-made-details who tracked down Cathy Lee, the interpreter Daisey used in Shenzhen (and who figures as a prominent part of Daisey’s story). Lee professed surprise at Daisey’s claims, denying many of the most damning ones. Schmitz and TAL’s Ira Glass confronted Daisey. Daisey admitted faking visits, fluffing facts and using hearsay anecdotes and prior reports to fashion fictional situations that fit the narrative he was trying to tell. That story makes up today’s “This American Life,” titled “Retraction.”

But Daisey did not accept that what he’d done was wrong. On the contrary, in a blogpost yesterday, he asserted that he had acted with complete integrity: “I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece [that] uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story….What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed ‘This American Life’ to air an excerpt from my monologue.…But this is my only regret.”

And, to his credit, Daisey’s position is fully consistent with his past.

You see, if Glass (and the rest of the media) had looked a little more closely at Daisey’s recent history, they’d have encountered one of his lesser-known pieces, a monologue called “Truth.” In that piece, Daisey explored the strange and, from the vantage point of today, ironic stories of JT LeRoy and James Frey — both of which are milestone cases of literary fabrication. He also briefly discusses his own history of exaggeration, sharing how an anecdote about butchering a deer evolved, onstage, into a full story about working in a slaughterhouse. Though “Truth” concludes ultimately that those who stretch facts must in some way be held accountable, it is remarkably ambivalent on that point, something that author Phil Campbell challenged him on, accusing him of privileging “empathy” over “truth.”

Daisey’s emailed response to Campbell was telling. “Of course working toward empathy sometimes undermines the truth — everything sometimes undermines the truth, including obsessive insistence on absolute truth, as though there even were such an animal.…I’m interested in the conflict between truth and fiction that is inherent to the process of being alive.”

There’s much more to Daisey’s response, but the short form version is, essentially, that he believes in the power of literary truth — of narrative truth. And that, sometimes, requires lying. There’s a telling scene in “Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in which Daisey, having run into all of the expected walls with authorities, essentially decides to fall back on what he knows best. “I have been trying to do things ‘the right way,’ I can’t get anywhere. I’ve been working with a fixer for the BBC—all the doors are closed. And you reach a certain point when you realize you may need to obey your natural inclinations.”

What are those natural inclinations? In the monologue, they’re to barrel over, Hawaiian shirt and all, to the main gates of Foxconn’s biggest factory and stake out the flow of employees in and out. But in real life, they’re simply…to tell a story. A good story. A great one — with narrative truth, if not factual truth. A story not to be believed, but believed in — another distinction Daisey makes in his response to Campbell:

“I’ve never known anyone who has expressed actual surprise about the Frey and LeRoy revelations — shock, disgust, and amazement, but never actual surprise,” he says. “Everyone I know who knew the works weren’t surprised because, once seen, the road is always so clear in retrospect — everyone thinks, ‘How could anyone ever have believed these stories?’ The answer is that for a variety of reasons people wanted to believe in these stories, and that is what I find interesting.”

People want to believe in Daisey’s stories, because they want to have faith in the ability of individuals to change the path of history with their actions. They want to believe they can think different, act different, and — as crazy as it sounds — make the world a better place. It is, again quite ironically, exactly the same enchantment Steve Jobs always depended on to sell his magical devices — you may not believe me, but you want to believe in me, and what I’m saying is that this is changing the game, changing the industry, changing the world.

When Jobs did it, they called it his “Reality Distortion Field.”

And Daisey calls it emotional truth, or essential truth, or the “truth of the story.” But deep down inside, he probably knows what it really is. Because about two-thirds of the way through “Agony and Ecstasy,” he writes a scene that (if it actually happened) involves him telling his interpreter Cathy that he intends to create a false identity as an American businessman to gain access to Foxconn’s hidden dormitories and assembly lines, purporting to be doing a pre-deal inspection. The key exchange in that scene goes like this:

“She says, ‘You…will lie to them.’ And I say, ‘Yes, Cathy. I’m going to lie to lots of people.’”

Now that, finally, is the truth.

***

I outreached to Daisey for comment via Facebook, and haven’t gotten a response. His publicist, Phil Rinaldi, says Daisey is “not speaking to anyone about this right now” — presumably because the return run of “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is having its final performances at the New York Public Theater this weekend. I’m sure the shows will sell out now, if they haven’t already.

I’m not interested in attacking Daisey: I accept, to some degree, his rationale that he’s a performance artist and not a journalist. On the other hand, he’s tacitly accepted the praise and framing that others placed on his work, by appearing on dozens of TV shows and radio programs — with the most recent flurry occurring just a week ago, as he appeared everywhere talking about the human cost of the new iPad.

The story he’s telling is an important one. There’s a huge human cost to the creation of cool devices. But by blurring fact and fiction, not on stage, but on camera, in print and on air, Daisey has seriously compromised his ability to act as a credible voice on this issue — and significantly hurt the cause of labor organizers and advocates in China, who now face the possibility that all of their claims will be treated with skepticism or dismissed, both by authorities in China and potential supporters in the U.S.

Fortunately, momentum has already built to change the way things are done for the better. Tim Cook, as Apple CEO, has made it a corporate mandate to eliminate abuses where possible throughout the supply chain. Having just returned from South By Southwest Interactive, the nation’s biggest annual gathering of digital creative professionals, I can say that the goal of incorporating social equity into the way the tech business is run is only gathering steam.

And that, in no small part, is due to Mike Daisey. If only he’d put his status as a creative professional out front in all of his advocacy, rather than letting the likes of TechCrunch call him a “crusading journalist,” he might have dodged the inevitable backlash entirely.